Obviously tournies are mad variance but I have a -30roi at Stars in my first 300 tournies. This is no biggie but I could do with turning this around soon as I have a decent whack stuck on FT and I don't want to redeposit on stars again. I have had a number of deepish runs but am just running awful at the key times. Standard stuff obv.

My latest disappointment was in the Sunday Million.I freerolled it on a satelitte (FPPS) and played very solid to get into the money. This was especially true as I had a very tough starting table. Once I made the money I took a slightly speculative gamble on this hand below. Not sure what tournament regs make of this? I figured that at this stage I had to try and get something going. I had been very card dead and thought I had some fold equity but in hindsight this isn't really true.The opener had been v active and the caller was quite weak passive. Let me know what you think. Retrospectively, this was a bit of a gamble, where I have a hand that plays well multiway and I hope to run good. It can get very difficult around the 10-20bb range when you're just not picking up any hands, you want to balance making something happen with not spewing off.

I had a pretty soft table at this point and had around 30 plus bb at this point with about 500 to go. Then I was near busted on this hand where I am still just so pissed off. This is an epitome of the bullshit that I have had on Stars thus far. The sick thing is this complete tool ended up coming 5th for 55k. Unreal. I had also seen him showing such skills as limping utg with 99 with 10bb and doing the same with QJS and this guy wins 55k. Ridiculous. Talk about catching lightning in a jar.

I have been trying to study some and have watched the Daaaaaang16/iSport series MTT Practices which I thought was very good and I learnt a lot from it. I feel like my fundamentals are a lot more solid now and I think that soon, I bloody well hope soon, that I will start to crush. I have read the Rizen/Apestyles/Pearljammer books and got something out of them. Although I thought that Pearljammmer's analysis and general game was the strongest by far. Some of the stuff Rizen was advocating and his justifications seemed off to me. But, hey what the fuck do I know?

I was doing very well in cash games and was beating 200nl RUSH at a decent clip for 350k hands.I am still not totally sure what direction to go in with the cash or tournies debate.

I'm going to make an effort to start blogging more regularly and looking over some hands. GLGLGL.

table ninja + 24 6max PS tables might be as close to 6max rush as we can get.

I feel like it is totally different though in my view because you could exploit 'the mechanics of the design' of rush itself, whereas that does not exist in normal poker, if you get what I am trying to say?

The thing about RUSH was that it attracted a lot of donks trying to make a quick buck, who were sort of action junkies and regs who weren't too good but made a lot from rake. As a general rule it seemed soft.

I really think the speed of it helped me too. I learnt a lot over a short period and also I didn't lose concentration and play as many marginal spots because I didn't get bored.

The design of rush itself was awesome because the hero had a clean image every hand and the edge in rush came from playing a very exploitable style which wouldn't really be exploited by random donks because they were unable to even come up with a counter strategy as well as the fact that other regulars didnt have a huge incentive to really go out of their way to exploit you because it involved thinking too much and deviating from their exploitable strategy! I guess the ones who did the best were the ones who had a very general exploitable strategy plus the ability to deviate from it to exploit the other regs who were incapable of adapting.

I don't really know how much of a reader you are but I would say you should read anything by Paul Auster or Phillip Roth. They are two of my favourite authors and really heavyweights of the 20th C. They are literary but also just great stories.

I read 'Matterhorn' by Karl Marlantes which is a great book on the Vietnam war.